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Subject:RE: The demise of the printed manual? From:"Lydia Wong" <lydiaw -at- fpoint -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 12 Apr 2001 12:11:36 -0400
Warren Singer asked:
How many of you work for companies that only provide online documentation?
(pdf format/html/online help). Is it acceptable in today's market?
Scott Turner added:
On the other hand, many programmers would rather use their computer to
reference material. [He also added . . . ] And while I have noticed that
many programmers say that they like to have an online reference, most end up
printing it out so that they can read it.
My two cents:
We're getting a little bit away from what Warren asked about the
Telecommunications and
carrier industry, but I'll share what we've found. We documents how to use
our controls in creating Windows applications. (We document the APIs for
ActiveX and DLL controls.) Our audience is programmers. We provided printed
User's Guides (covering concepts, how-tos, appendices of additional
technical info. and summary charts) and online versions of the User's Guide
and all the reference material for most of our products. For our
best-selling product, we even make available to users printed versions of
the reference guides for purchase, and some do purchase them.
Our customers love our printed documentation. They write on their
registration cards how glad they are to have printed manuals. They send us
e-mails saying they're so happy to have a book they can take home, read at
lunch, read in bed at night (seriously, someone wrote that), etc. A few
years back, we even went to providing hard-cover books rather than the
soft-cover, perfect-bound ones. Customers called our company president to
say how much they liked them!
Will we always provide books? I don't know. We experimented on one product
and provided online help and PDF only, and customers survived. But they do
ask where the book is. It is expensive, and a bit of work to provide docs in
all these formats, but our customers seem to appreciate it.
I don't know if we sell more products because of our printed documentation,
but the customer response has been and continues to be very positive.
Lydia
__________________
Lydia Wong
Technical Writer
FarPoint Technologies, Inc.
www.fpoint.com
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